Parachute Club, pt. 1

I work at a student union, and a vaguely loony one at that. I suspect most student unions are de facto insane asylums, but mine has a particular turbulence that occasionally makes me feel like I'm jumping out of a plane with no parachute.

Like gays and lesbians, who are represented across demographic lines, students come in all shapes and sizes. And it's generally the more progressive students (just as it's generally the more progressive gays and lesbians) who've created organisations that lobby to improve the lot of the community, even on behalf of those constituents who might have a more conservative bent. In fact, on paper students have even more in common than LGBTQ folk - all students choose an education, whereas sexuality isn't a matter of choice.

I'm all in favour of student unions, because students are royally disenfranchised, at least around here. Tuition fees are increasing across the board for general degrees, professional programs are even worse, and the Liberal government seems inclined to do absolutely nothing. All this begs the question: why don't students in Ontario rise up? When will students take to the streets?

One common refrain heard in student union offices is that students are too worried about their marks to take time out and protest. This may be partially true. I have a feeling, though, that students take an attitude similar to that of many Canadians these days in regard to our very ragged social safety net - if things still seem pretty much okay, why complain? Surely they won't get any worse.

This is the slow-bleed approach to civilizational deconstruction, one that works particularly well in an age of soundbites, instant gratification and a collective social amnesia that erodes our ability to internalise change in time. Try it at home - just raid the cookie jar one cookie at a time, and no one will notice. It's a bit like falling from high up in the air - you don't notice how fast you're going until you're a red smudge on a GoogleEarth map.

Speaking of which, the visionary urban theorist Jane Jacobs' favorite quote was her grandmother's contention that "you can run anything into the ground," something that history (and accidents like this one) have made abundantly clear.

Don't cry for me, Argentina

Germany 1 - Argentina 1
Penalties: Germany 4, Argentina 2

Does anyone else see the striking resemblance between Oliver Neuville and Jeremy from Pure Pwnage?

Stiny! Keep flushing those toilets!

As many members of my miniscule readership know, I have a fairly intimate acquaintance with public transit. This trend stems from two factors: a) I am cheap and b) my parents are also cheap. The latter point caused my family to settle in a bucolic town just close enough to Toronto to make commuting practical, and just far enough away to make it expensive; the former point (coupled with c) Toronto is even more expensive than commuting) means that I now live with my family, and take the train into the city on a daily basis, joining thousands of others who blearily trudge through Union Station between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:30am.

So what, you say? Public transit isn't all bad. Sure, the GO Train looks like something from a Duplo set, the Greyhound bus is smelly, and VIARail operates trains about as often as the Leafs win Stanley Cups, but on the whole, it works. There is however, one thing I have to decry about all modes of urban transport: the deplorable state of transit vehicle washrooms.

There's nothing more awful than being forced (on a Friday night, say) to venture to the washroom of a packed Greyhound bus, bumping its way along Highway 401 - stepping over sleeping passengers with their belongings and feet spilling into the already tiny aisle, feeling the eyes of those passengers unlucky enough to be sitting close to the washroom at the back of the bus judge you as you pass ("yep, that one's gonna be ripe"), trying to get the door of the washroom, slightly larger than a catflap, open. But that, my friends, is just stage one of the horror, the horror.

Once you actually get into the washroom, a new set of challenges present themselves. For instance, do you stand or sit? My female colleagues are generally relieved of this choice, though that's frankly more of a curse than a blessing. Inevitably, the toilet (essentially a high tech outhouse on wheels) smells awful, and even more inevitably, the toilet seat, surround, and floor are coated in a thin layer of urine. There's never any toilet paper. Heaven forbid there be water to wash with. And the little dispensers of moist towelettes are always out.

Finally, as many of you may have experienced first hand, urinating in a moving vehicle doesn't do much for the ol' internal organs' relaxation. You think stage fright at the ballpark is bad? There's nothing to aggravate shy bladder syndrome like being bounced around in a tin closet the size of a bathtub and thinking of the multitude just outside the plastic door who can hear your every movement (or lack thereof) and are alternately questioning your ability to perform, and wondering when they can use the washroom themselves. If the faucet does eventually "turn on," there's the added problem of spraying the cubicle with your own distinct odor.

Trains aren't much better. And don't even getting me started about #2.

...So heavy that I feel like squashing it

Alright, enough of this namby-pamby affect. "Blunt and brash" is what the descriptor says, and blunt and brash is what the blogosphere is going to get. Stay tuned for LAFFS! THRILLS! CHILLS! SPILLS! OTHER THINGS CAPITALISED UNNECESSARILY. etc.

Just to get it out of the way, I want to note right here and right now that the navel-gazing-what-is-my-audience-thinking-about-and-
how-can-I-second-guess-them-into-thinking-what-I-want-them-to-think quality of blogging has already worn a little thin. And it's only the second post! So to avoid further postmodern-esque distractions on this store, below are the Top Five Things I Already Despise About Blogging:

5. Worrying about worrying that I sound too self-reflexive. Deconstruct that at your leisure. Trust me, by the time you've done so I'll have developed another ulcer.

4. Desperately trying to gauge whether my writing style is pithy, cynical, verbose and trendy enough to land me a book deal. This is a problem seemingly common to young literary types with few prospects and fewer business smarts.

3. Re-reading things that I've already written, and realising that I am subtly comparing them against articles from the latest issue of The Walrus (the result is not flattering).

2. Contemplating the scorn that will rain like a plague of toads on my head from friends and acquaintances, accusing me (quite correctly) of catching the blogging bug secondhand from Simon G. Frank and his musings about sharkfin collars.

1. A lack of spell check. This is really something that prompts screaming horros. Horors. Horrors.

It occurs to me, in re-reading my typo-ridden, unflattering and unsaleable effort thus far (wasn't that self-reflexive?) that blogging has got to be the most individualised and oddly non-communal form of written communication ever invented. Surely someone else has noticed this? Jotting down whatever sprang to mind and assuming it would be gobbled up by the masses used to be the domain of a few rich industrialists and L. Ron Hubbard, but now everyone's doing it. Seriously though, the mediating presence of an anonymous box through which one filters all this junk (mentally if in no other way) is vaguely terrifying - just one more step in the forced march towards an atomised, dissociated and technology-dependent "public" sphere. Isn't that cheery?

All this being said, I will attempt to reign in my pessimism and provide equal parts information and entertainment here at The Stark Contrast. There will be some opinions. There will be some reviews of things. There will be some pictures, maybe. I will occasionally (for my own contrarian purposes) lampoon and dispute the assertions of my colleague down the way at Exquisite Vanity. But most of the time, it will just be me yakking. And despite the techonological gloss, that's really nothing new, is it?

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy...

I think this is my third or fourth attempt at concerted blogging. My attention span is similar to that of a parakeet, so previous attemps have gone nowhere. However, I now have a great motivator - envy! Simon has a blog. Ergo, I also want a blog. Simon is amusing. Ergo, I am amusing. Or at least that's the idea. That, and to be able to use the word "ergo" as frequently as possible.

Scratch that, I am not amusing at all. The previous sentences were forced and heavy-handed. I should stick to fripperies and avoid all this heavy-duty stuff. As Ecclesiastes notes, "vanity, vanity, all is vanity." Speaking of which, check out "Exquisite Vanity" for more of the same.